<p>You should not be concerned about Princeton being ranked eleventh in engineering, behind 5 public schools, 3 "tech" schools (MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Caltech), Cornell and Stanford. Princeton is in the top three for overall undergraduate experience.</p>
<p>Everybody has different preferences. I would use the US News Engineering ranking as a starting point but then apply your own personal values and tastes.</p>
<p>If you want to study engineering among a well-rounded, uniformly brilliant student body immersed in a sophisticated Ivy culture, then Princeton is hard to beat. I think Princeton, Cornell, and Stanford are the best schools academically for undergraduate engineering, and I am not so sure about Stanford because of its high proportion of graduate students.</p>
<p>The public engineering universities have a different climate and culture and they have a student body that is more diverse in abilities. I also wonder about the amount of attention undergrads get from profs at the state schools. Not sure. The publics lack the prestige of the elite privates. On the other hand, the top publics have excellent physical resources.</p>
<p>MIT and Caltech (and CMU to some extent) lack the breadth of interests and curriculum that is found in the Ivies and Stanford. They seem a little too narrow in focus. On the other hand, MIT and Caltech have extremely talented student bodies and great prestige in technical fields.</p>
<p>Princeton and Cornell are intellectually lush and culturally rich environments in which to study engineering. I would choose them over any of the publics and, for most fields of engineering, over any other private engineering schools.</p>